finanzen.net ZERO

The price list is one of the shortest in German retail finance, and almost every line reads EUR 0.00.

What costs nothing: buying or selling shares, ETFs and funds on gettex or off-exchange with the bank; buying or selling certificates and warrants; savings plans in shares, ETFs and funds; changing or cancelling an order; instructions on corporate actions; buying or selling subscription rights on gettex; custody; the clearing account; transfers to your reference account; dividend processing; and the re-registration of registered shares.

What costs something:

• EUR 1.00 Mindermengenzuschlag on orders below EUR 500 of market value in shares, funds, ETFs and subscription rights, and on derivative orders below 500 units
• EUR 1.00 per order executed through the daily fractional-trading window
• EUR 25.00 for a written order, and EUR 25.00 for an AGM ticket
• 0.20% of market value to exercise a warrant, conversion right or certificate
• 1.0% of market value on crypto (0.5% to DonauCapital plus 0.5% to Baader Bank) plus a reduced spread, with EUR 1.00 of surcharges below EUR 500
• 3-month EURIBOR plus 3.00% p.a. on a Depotkredit
• 0.00% p.a. credit interest on cash, which is a cost in the sense that everyone else's cash is earning something

The interesting part is the plumbing, and ZERO discloses it properly. DonauCapital's contractual brokerage fee is EUR 7.50 plus 0.25% of order value per order, and EUR 1.00 per savings-plan execution. On balance, you do not pay it, but the route to zero depends on the product. On shares, ETFs and funds (and subscription rights on them) you pay Baader Bank a settlement fee and receive a Baader credit that is at least as large as that settlement fee. DonauCapital charges its fee only in the amount of the difference between the two, defers the rest until any trail commissions or net-new-asset fees from its cooperation partners arrive, offsets those and waives whatever remains. On shares, the price list states, DonauCapital receives no payments from cooperation partners at all. The exception is the EUR 1.00 small-order or fractional charge: on those orders the Baader credit can be smaller than the settlement fee, and DonauCapital reduces its own EUR 1.00 by the difference so that you still pay EUR 1.00 in total. These EUR 1.00 charges are not offset against third-party payments.

On certificates and warrants DonauCapital defers its fee and Baader Bank defers its settlement fee of EUR 0.00 to EUR 5.00; both are then offset against inducements from partners involved in execution, such as product issuers. The rest of DonauCapital's fee is waived, and if the inducements do not cover the settlement cost, DonauCapital pays the difference itself. The price list puts such inducements at EUR 0.00 to EUR 50.00 per transaction for securities, and on funds DonauCapital additionally receives trail commissions of 0.00% to 2.50% p.a. of the invested amount.

That is the honest version of "free", though it is not one mechanism: on shares the zero rests on the custodian bank's credit and on DonauCapital waiving the rest of its fee; on ETFs and funds the same credit applies, and any trail commissions or net-new-asset fees DonauCapital receives are set against the deferred part of that fee before the rest is waived; and on certificates and warrants your dealing is funded by inducements from partners involved in execution. The arrangement is disclosed before every order in the ex-ante cost sheet and again in the annual ex-post report, which is more transparency than the model usually gets.

The structure matters more here than at most brokers, because the brand you interact with holds no licence at all.

• finanzen.net zero GmbH (Gartenstrasse 67, 76135 Karlsruhe, HRB 740449 Mannheim, LEI 391200HYYPHNRAWJ0G74) runs the app, the website and the customer relationship. It is a tied agent under section 3 (2) WpIG, registered in BaFin's intermediary register under 80165132, and it acts exclusively for the account and under the liability of DonauCapital.
• DonauCapital Wertpapier GmbH (Passauer Strasse 5, 94161 Ruderting) is the licensed investment firm and the client's actual counterparty for investment brokerage, and separately provides MiCAR crypto services. DonauCapital Financial Services GmbH acts as the contract-closing intermediary.
• Baader Bank AG (Unterschleissheim) holds the banking licence, runs the clearing account and keeps the securities.

The practical consequences:

• Cash is covered by the statutory German deposit guarantee up to EUR 100,000 per client at Baader Bank, plus a voluntary layer whose published ceiling third parties currently state inconsistently.
• Securities are client property. They sit in the usual depositories in your name and are handed back in an insolvency rather than compensated. Only a failure to deliver triggers investor compensation, at 90% up to EUR 20,000.
• The EUR 100,000 is per client per bank. Smartbroker+ and Traders Place also settle at Baader; if you hold more than one of these, you share one limit.
• Crypto has no protection at all. Coins live at Tangany GmbH, BaFin-supervised for custody, but outside every compensation scheme.

None of this is unusual for a German neobroker and none of it is hidden - the price list names every entity. But it is worth being clear-eyed: there is no publicly listed parent, no published audited accounts for the ZERO entity, and ownership changed in 2024 when Axel Springer sold finanzen.net to a British investor. This is a well-plumbed distribution business, not a bank.

Every securities order at finanzen.net ZERO executes on gettex, the electronic trading venue of the Munich exchange, or off-exchange directly with the bank. There is no Xetra, no Tradegate, no L&S, no foreign exchange, no choice.

This is the single most consequential fact about the broker, and it cuts both ways.

In favour: it makes the product radically simple - no venue picker, no fee table to memorise, no wrong answer. For a monthly ETF savings plan, the venue is genuinely irrelevant. The current price list does not present the venue relationship as what pays for your dealing: the broker says it changed its fee model because of the ban on payment for order flow in Art. 39a MiFIR, which it dates to 1 July 2026 - investment firms may no longer accept money or other benefits for routing client orders to a particular venue. What the zero price rests on is set out in the fees section above.

Against: you have no benchmark. With three competing quotes you can see whether a price is fair; with one, you take what you are given. Trading hours run 07:30 to 23:00 on weekdays and 14:00 to 19:00 on Saturdays, which sounds generous, but Finanztip's advice is worth repeating: trade between 09:00 and 17:30, when Xetra is open and the reference market is liquid. Outside that window the gettex spread widens and there is nothing to compare it with. Always use a limit.

For US shares the point sharpens. ZERO quotes them in euros on gettex. There is no explicit FX charge - but there is no home-market access either, so the cross-border cost is inside the spread rather than on the invoice. On a EUR 5,000 US order, a broker charging EUR 4 plus a small FX markup with direct Nasdaq access can easily be cheaper in total than a "free" euro-denominated fill. The zero commission is real; it is not the same thing as zero cost.

Order types are better than the venue count suggests: limit, stop, stop-limit, trailing stop-loss and OCO. Trailing stops and OCO in particular are missing from several better-known German neobrokers.

The universe is broad in count and narrow in kind - the broker's own figure is over 900,000 tradable instruments, almost all of them exchange-traded products or issuer derivatives.

Available:

• 8,500+ shares from 52 countries, including Swiss shares, all quoted in euros on gettex
• 2,000+ ETFs and ETCs from Amundi, iShares, DWS Xtrackers, Vanguard and others
• Actively managed funds from houses such as DWS, Flossbach von Storch and Fidelity, all without a front-end load
• More than 1.6 million derivatives from Goldman Sachs, HSBC Deutschland, Morgan Stanley, UniCredit, UBS and Vontobel — the broker's own live product directory counts 1,670,622, alongside 8,750 shares, 2,836 funds, 2,625 ETFs, 282 ETCs and 60 crypto pairs. The figures of 180,000 and 300,000 that circulate come from two stale blocks further down the broker's own homepage, one of which still names a EUR 500 minimum order size that was abolished long ago
• 59 crypto assets as real coins, plus 50+ crypto ETPs from issuers including CoinShares and 21Shares, some with staking
• More than 10,000 savings plans on shares, indices, funds, commodities and crypto, from EUR 1.00
• Fractional trading, so any euro amount can be put into any covered share
• Money-market and iBonds-style maturity ETFs, which the broker actively markets as the substitute for the interest it does not pay on cash

Missing:

• Individual bonds. Fixed income exists only in ETF form.
• Options, futures, forex and CFDs. Nothing exchange-traded and leveraged.
• Any venue other than gettex, so instruments quoted only on a home market are simply unavailable.
• Joint accounts, second accounts and business accounts. One person, one account.

The junior account is a genuine strength: identical pricing, no running cost, and Finanztip rates it the best-value Kinderdepot among its recommendations. The catch is the opening conditions - both legal guardians must consent and both must already hold their own ZERO account, which excludes sole-custody parents entirely.

Opening is quick and fully digital, but the eligibility gate is specific: you need your main residence in the EU, so Swiss residents are not accepted. Business clients are not accepted and joint accounts do not exist. Because ZERO gives no advice, the application asks you to self-certify experience with shares and funds. There is no minimum deposit.

Funding is SEPA credit transfer only to the Baader Bank clearing account - no cards, no PayPal, no e-wallets. Deposits and withdrawals to the registered reference account are free.

Transferring a portfolio in is supported and free from a German provider, subject to the securities being tradable at ZERO (checked during the form), no open orders at the old bank, and the account being in exactly your own name. Fractional holdings cannot be transferred and must be sold or left behind. Expect several weeks.

Then there is the part most reviews skip: the Fair Use Policy. finanzen.net ZERO publishes an explicit list of behaviours it considers abusive and reserves the right to terminate the relationship for repeated or serious breaches:

• opening an account and never funding it
• accessing the site with software to run automated or high-frequency trading
• exploiting latency or minimal price movements for arbitrage
• placing regularly economically pointless transactions - which the policy defines as positions held for seconds and closed for minimal or no profit

For a buy-and-hold investor this is irrelevant. For anyone contemplating a scripted strategy, a scalping approach, or even an unusually active week of small round trips, it is a hard constraint that a paid-commission broker would not impose. Where certificates and warrants are concerned, this is the logical consequence of an inducement-funded model: the broker earns per order from issuers and other partners involved in execution, and orders that cost those partners money are the ones it does not want.

Yes - and this is the decisive local argument for a German investor choosing ZERO over a foreign broker.

Because Baader Bank is a German bank, it acts as the statutory withholding agent (auszahlende Stelle) for the account. In practice:

• Abgeltungsteuer at 25% plus solidarity surcharge, and church tax where applicable, is withheld at source on realised gains, dividends, interest and distributions and remitted directly to the tax office.
• The Freistellungsauftrag covering the EUR 1,000 annual allowance per person can be lodged with the bank and is applied automatically.
• Loss pots for shares and for other instruments are maintained and offset within the year before tax is calculated, and a Verlustbescheinigung can be requested at year end.
• The Vorabpauschale on accumulating funds and ETFs is calculated and collected each January without any action from you.
• Annual tax documents are provided free.

The result for a German-resident investor with only a ZERO account is usually nothing to enter in the Anlage KAP at all - which is worth more in avoided hassle than most of the fee differences in this comparison.

Two qualifications. First, ZERO also accepts Austrian residents, and for them the German withholding machinery does not do the equivalent job: an Austrian client does not get the automatic KESt treatment an Austrian bank would provide. Check your own position before assuming the convenience transfers across the border.

Second, crypto is outside the withholding regime. Coins are not securities under German law; gains are private sale transactions under section 23 EStG with a one-year holding period, and the bank does not withhold. Those gains remain yours to declare.

Research is the reason to pick ZERO over an otherwise identical rival, and it is not really the broker's own work. finanzen.net is the largest retail finance portal in the German-speaking world - quotes, charts, company data, news, analyst opinion, forums - and the ZERO order ticket is embedded inside it through the Broker Cockpit. You are not switching between a research site and a trading app; the buy button is on the page you were already reading. No competitor at this price point offers that.

On top of the portal sit two integrated professional platforms: TraderFox for screening and pattern recognition, and stock3 (formerly Guidants) for charting, news and analysis with order routing into a ZERO account. Both are third-party products with their own learning curves, but they close the gap to a full-service broker for anyone who wants more than the app.

Education is essentially the finanzen.net content library - explainer articles, glossaries and market pieces aimed at retail investors. It is broad and readable rather than structured, and there is no demo account, which for a broker aimed squarely at beginners is a real gap.

Support is the weakest part of the record and the score is deliberate. The only channel is a ticket system inside the login, reached from the person icon on desktop or the settings gear in the app. There is no published telephone hotline and no live chat. Finanztip cites the missing hotline explicitly as one of the reasons ZERO lands mid-table on service despite topping the cost rankings.

For a savings-plan investor who never needs to speak to anyone, that trade is easy to accept - and 26,000 App Store ratings averaging about 4.7 suggest most users do accept it. If a corporate action is misbooked or a transfer stalls, a ticket queue is a slow way to find out what happened.